When we first received WinBook’s Viiv-ready Jiv (both words rhyme with five—go figure), we realized that we didn’t really know exactly what it meant to be a “Viiv” PC. And remember, we pride ourselves on knowing the difference between an AMB and AMT.

The relentless snare drum crack on “Jack of Speed” was enough to make some of the lesser earbuds beg for mercy, but the Etymotic ER-6 Isolators delivered it nearly perfectly. More importantly, they served up Beck’s bass with equal authority.

Seagate’s portable external drive sports the highest capacity in its class, by 40GB, thanks to its perpendicular recording technology, which packs more data on every platter of the hard drive. It comes in a rough-and-ready aluminum enclosure that keeps the drive both safe and cool.

When we looked at Digital Storm’s Twister Ultra 4, we thought of it as Every Dude’s Machine. You know, it’s just how the average person would build it. There’s no fancy-pants paint or custom wiring. But there is a gratuitous use of drive bay doodads like an LED screen, removable hard drive adapter, and Creative Labs Live drive. The upshot? The already-macho-looking Cooler Master CM Stacker case looks even more, well, macho. Yup, this rig will make you hitch up your pants, snort, and say, “Oh yeah, this is just how I’d build it—none of that sissy stuff!”

Oh, how the world turns. Last month you marched past the Intel 975X chipset motherboards holding your nose, but with the release of the Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Extreme CPUs you’ve made a U-turn to give this chipset a second look.

It’s been our experience that you get what you pay for, more often than not. The ExtremeMac FS1 earbuds, however, fall into the “not” territory. The $150 for-sale sign hanging on these little buggers easily qualifies them as the most expensive earphones of the group, but they certainly didn’t sound like it.

The Zyxel PL-100 uses the same Intellon INT 5500CS chipset that Netgear’s XE104 uses (reviewed May 2006), and the results are predictable: In our bandwidth tests, we managed a mere 1.2Mb/s—slower than our DSL line.

This phone is sexy. Sounds funny doesn’t it? Cordless phones are supposed to be boring, black or gray, and for the most part, featureless. The CIT200 looks like a slightly oversized cellphone—it even has a color screen and easy-to-use menu options. Once you’ve juiced up the phone and installed Skype and the handset’s drivers, you can plug in the phone’s USB transmitter and you’re good to go.